I wanted to upgrade my father's laptop with an SSD drive. He has a Presario Compaq CQ-57 with Windows 7 HOME.First I installed the latest BIOS firmware on his laptop. Then I removed the HDD (250GB with 100GB Free) and installed a Sandisk Ultra II (240 GB). I connected the original HDD with a USB drive cable. I booted from a USB thumb drive with IFD installed on it. I used the following settings:Global Settings (1st Page):General- Automatic Scaling Restrictions- Automatic Boot Partition UpdateGeometry- Align Partitions on 1 MiB Boundaries

When finished (a couple of hours later as the USB was only 2.0 and I had it make a validate byte-for-byte pass), I shut down the laptop, removed the HDD and the USB Thumb drive and restarted. The laptop would go through the BIOS startup and then hang with just a blinking cursor on the screen - no error message.

I went into the BIOS Setup which had almost NO options for anything. The only Hard Drive related options were the boot order. I did run the hard drive diagnostic in the BIOS and that found the drive and did a non-destructive pass on it.

On the SSD, there are 2 partitions or importance - the "System" partition (200MB) and the C-Drive (Windows) partition (200GB). The System partition is where the boot files are stored and that is the one set to Active.

I just looked at my Win 7 Pro system and it's setup the same way with a small "System" partition and a C-Drive (Windows) partition and on my system the C-Drive is set to Active.

Now, I'm getting a little confused. I know that the BCD file in the Boot directory stores the information that used to be in Boot.ini in the XP days. On both computer's drives (my fathers and mine) there is a Boot directory containing BCD files and logs on both the System partition and the Windows partition.

On my father's drive the System partition is set to Active and the BCD files in the Boot directory of the System Partition have current dates. The BCD files in the Boot directory of the Windows partition show old dates, probably installation dates.

On my computer it's just the opposite. The Windows partition is set to Active and the BCD files in the Boot directory of the Windows Partition have current dates. The BCD files in the Boot directory of the System partition show old dates, probably installation dates.

Unfortunately I no longer have access to my fathers laptop so I cannot check his HDD to see which partition is active.

My main question is what did I do wrong in the first place. Is my assumption that IFD should create a bootable SSD without having to troubleshoot it to get it to work. Should I be using a different program entirely? I specifically put the SSD into the laptop before imaging as I thought that went a long way towards preventing problems. Are there other settings I should have used in the program?Thanks,-Marc

The partition you refer to as System is a partition that Windows install uses to unpack the installer data if no partition exists before hand and of a sufficient size to hold them. It may or may not contain boot info, I've seen both. The C partition is what you want as the target for boot. If boot files are missing, you get the prompt to insert the OS disk and repair it. The System partition should have nothing to do with anything, it doesn't even get a drive letter. It doesn't get created if you follow certain steps.

In Partition Work, I'd make the C partition active and try booting. What happens?

As I said I don't have access to my father's laptop. So I cannot test anything. The next time I'm in Florida I'll try and install it again using different cloning software. I just expected IFD to be able to do the job without problems.

You're trying to fix the current problem, which I do appreciate, but I need to know how to successfully clone his HDD when I return to Florida.

What I suggest next time is to create an Entire Drive image of the HD. Write the image to an external USB HD. Remove the internal HD and install the SSD. Boot an IFL flash drive (it's much faster than IFD). Do an Entire Drive restore from the image on the USB HD. Use this Option for the restore...

Log Results to File

That's all you need unless you want to use Validate too.

If you get a message about the SSD being too small, add another Option...

Not necessarily. Let's say you had a 500 GB HD with 100 GB of data in a single partition. A restored image/Copy might not fit on a 400 GB HD. It's related to sector position rather than data size. See...

I looked at the article, then looked at the SSD with IFW. I totaled up the size needed and it was 170GB to Restore, which would fit on the SSD without any problems.

I actually tried the cloning 2 ways. The first, which I haven't talked about, was to make an image on an external USB drive (HDD in Laptop, External USB HD and Bootable USB with IFD). Then I attached the External USB HD with the image file and the new SSD via USB to my own laptop (with USB 3.0). I used IFW to copy the Image to the SSD. No errors reported, successful validation. But when I put the SSD in the Compaq Laptop - would not boot.The second attempt was as described (SSD installed in Compaq, old HDD connected by USB and Bootable USB with IFD - the Compaq only has USB 2.0). Same thing, no error message, Restore reported success - would not boot.

So is there a problem with the options I selected, or did I miss one or what??